Review: Bientôt l'Été by Tale of Tales: Enigma. Variations?

Users stationed in the Desbaresdes belt and current or former citizens of the Chauvin system are advised to use with caution.

This note on the homepage for Tale of Tales' Bientôt l'Été (Summer Soon) purports to be a warning relating to the MacGuffin of the game - that this is in fact a holographic simulator, allowing lonely astronauts on distant orbital platforms to experience some form of long-distance human contact. However, it is also a clue to the inspiration of the game. Desbaresdes and Chauvin are characters from Marguerite Duras' Moderato Cantabile, her most famous work.

At the heart of Moderato Cantabile is the relationship between Anne Desbaresdes, a bored society lady, and Chauvin, an unemployed worker, who meet, drink wine and talk in a cafe while Desbaresdes' child takes piano lessons nearby. Desbaresdes is fascinated by a shooting in the cafe, apparently a crime of passion, which has disrupted, briefly, the repetition of her life.l

Elements of the novel creep into the gameplay: although in no way necessary, knowledge of the story adds another layer to the experience of the game: what may look at first like non-linear art game weirdness can be seen in the context of the book.

Of course, basing a computer game set in the distant future on an examination of the quiet desperation of bourgeois French womanhood in the 1950s is, itself, going to look like non-linear art game weirdness. But there is a plan.

Paths and forests

Michaël Samyn and Auriea Harvey, the creative leads of Tale of Tales, insert themselves into the fictional universe where Bientôt l'Été is a holographic simulator rather than a Unity 3D game, as the engineer-designers of the holographic experience. However, they are also the makers of the game itself, and it is possible to trace lines from their earlier work to this point. Most obviously, thematically, is the digital art they made from their own meeting at distance - the two met, courted and fell in love through webchats and web pages when they were based on different continents.

Mechanically, there are references to 2009's The Path, probably still Tale of Tales' best-known game, and one which tends to polarize opinion. Once again, the default camera is behind the body of the avatar, a man or woman dressed in a somewhat 70s-futurist style. But instead of travelling through a dark forest, the setting is a beach, largely featureless. The gameplay, such as it is, moves in cycles. The player wanders a span of beach, bounded by the sea on one side and a boulevard on the other. The only building on the boulevard is a café - as the game progresses, this building shifts, denying the player a solid point of reference.

On the beach - no, hang on, wrong novel

By exploring the beach, the player can discover random but resonant objects, each of which, upon inspection, reveals a brief, non-interactive scene. When control is returned to the player, a chess piece is left where the evocative object once stood. There is then little more to do except go to the building and enter it. At this point, the 2nd part of the game begins.

Within the bulding, the view shifts to a top-down view of a chessboard, with the chess pieces so far discovered alongside it. Interacting either with a computer-controlled opposite number or a human being also playing the game at the same time in a manner reminiscent of thatgamecompany's Journey, the player can move chess pieces onto the board; each position produces a line of dialog, which the other player can then respond to in the same way. All this dialogue is taken from the works of Marguerite Duras, and leads to conversations often nonsensical and occasionally extremely poignant. Outside this mechanic, interactivity is limited to drinking wine, smoking, and changing the song that is playing in the background. Eventually, there is nothing to be done but to go back outside and hunt for another chess piece, in order to extend the conversation.

This may sound like a lot of spoilers, but it is impossible to discuss this game without discussing its structure - its narrative conceit is essentially its mechanic. There are elements I have not discussed, which have the power to surprise, but fundamentally the game's story is its gameplay, and vice versa. Tale of Tales specialize in using game engines to power evocative, semi-linear narrative design.

There is one more element - closing the player's eyes, which reveals a Matrix-like vision of the word - in effect, the virtual underpinnings of the experience the lonely spaceman or spacewoman controlled by the player is having. The cycle of day and night is lost, the player is able to skim along the beach at greater speed, and the objects which make up the only "real" things in the world are highlighted. Again, it's a very art-games touch, which confronts the player with the layers of artifice. You are playing a cosmonaut fighting their loneliness by playing a game in which they can interact with a stranger.

At the same time, you are sitting alone in the 21st century, interacting with a stranger by playing the part of a cosmonaut playing a game in a game. Whether this seems affecting or affected is probably a matter of taste. This mode shows the invisible walls of the game - the boundaries of the seemingly infinite beach.

Taste, and the impossibility of accounting for it...

The rules say that a mark out of 10 must be given in a review. Rarely has this seemed like such an absurd imposition. As a game, Bientôt l'Eté is hugely limited. As a self-consciously artsy way for lovers on different continents to interact, it is intriguing. As a meditation on sociability, possibility, the realism or lack of realism of gaming and indeed the recontextualization of classic works of French literature... it's an intriguing document.

Technically, what it does it does well, and certainly well enough. The character animation has that characteristic shuffle we saw in The Path, which must almost count as a signature. The environment is intentionally sparse, and has an intriguing, film-like grain to it. It is not realistic, but it can be beautiful. There are significantly easier ways to play chess online, if that is what you want to do. But, like all Tale of Tales' games, it has something.

Whether that something justifies $10 is hard to say. In terms of hours of playing time, there are better bargains, but a short film is not worse than a long film. If you liked The Path, Bientôt l'Eté is a relatable if more focused experience. If you have never played a game by Tale of Tales, but are interested in what the arthouse is doing with the hugely reduced costs of making a relatively simple game, and in the emotional possibilities of removing and recutting the experience of gameplay, Tale of Tales' work, and in particular The Path and Bientôt l'Eté, are interesting and worthwhile documents.

Score: 8/10, if you absolutely must. But play the online demo. See how it feels to you.

(A note on scoring: games are scored as they are within their field – which is to say, a flash game that scores 9/10 is very good flash game, but not necessarily equal to Dragon Age: Origins in scope or complexity. Borderlands 2 is a 9/10 game, as is FTL. Also, marks out of ten are a fundamentally arbitrary judgement, and probably should be treated with intense suspicion. What does 8/10 mean? What do any numbers really mean?)